‘Blue Banisters’: Lana Del Rey’s ultimate heartbreak anthem
From the very beginning, Lana Del Rey has mastered the art of the heartbreak anthem. On her unofficial debut, ‘Pawn Shop Blues’ is a devastating track and the need to leave a good man. Across all her earliest records, the feeling is explored through various cinematic lenses and characterful voices. But as she seemed to be chipping away, trying to articulate a specific type of headache, it all seemed to be laid out straight on ‘Blue Banisters’, her unassuming opus.
There are certainly other options for Del Rey’s most obvious musings on heartbreak. “I’ve nothing without you,” she croons on her debut. ‘Black Beauty’ sees her bargaining for her lover’s attention, while ‘Old Money’ keeps her in a state of waiting, hoping someone will come back for her. On ‘Blackest Day’, she declares, “Ever since my baby went away, it’s been the blackest day”, and so on.
In Del Rey’s cinematic world, heartbreak is a ruling emotion that she comes back to time and time again. On early records, it’s all part of the character she built for her voice. But on her later albums, it takes a more nuanced yet more devastating shape. As her storytelling seemed to leave more space for her own personal feelings, with fans marking a change around 2019 with Norman Fucking Rockwell, it seemed like the singer was letting people in more and writing for a more vulnerable and honest space.
That move has given way to a specific kind of heartache. On these later records, a longing for love comes up time and time again, matched with the heartbreak of feeling misunderstood or doomed by her own talent and destiny as an artist. “Photo free exits from baby’s bedside / ‘Cause they don’t yet know what car I drive / I’m just tryna keep my love alive,” she sings on ‘Bartender’ about trying to evade the press to protect a new relationship.
On her next album, Chemtrails Over The Country Club, Del Rey wonders if perhaps her life would be easier without her success, recalling love affairs before her notoriety as she sings, “It made me feel, made me feel like a god / It kinda makes me feel, like maybe I was better off.”
‘Let Me Love You Like A Woman’ lays it all out clearly as Del Rey sings about the desire to fall for someone and love in the way she wants to, without her work getting in the way as she writes, “I only mention it ’cause I’m ready to leave LA / And I need you to come (and I want you to come) / I guess I could manage if you stay / It’s just if you do, I can’t see myself having any fun,” ready to cast off Hollywood for a lover.
But it’s on ‘Blue Banisters’, the title track for her 2021 eighth album, that she articulates the devastation of this in the most gut-wrenching and powerful way. It’s a topic that stretches across the whole album, but on this eponymous track, she weaves between scenes of heartache as her lover doesn’t come back, and revelatory conversations with other women working in the creative world.
“She said, ‘Most men don’t want a woman / With a legacy, it’s our bane’ / She said ‘You can’t be a muse and be happy too / You can’t blacken the pages with Russian poetry / And be happy,’” she sings, recalling a conversation with singer Nikki Lane before adding simply, “And that scared me”.
As a song, ‘Blue Banisters’ deals with Del Rey’s heartbreak over the way that her talent, work and legacy may well have robbed her of a simple life of love. Contrasting these conversations with the women she loves with the image of a man who “said he’d come back” if she painted her “bannisters blue”, the central lyric is perhaps a metaphor for Del Rey feeling as if she dulled herself down and accepted a bluer life, rather than the vibrant green bannisters her friends paint, she might be able to find a partner.
It’s beautiful and gut-wrenching. Of all of Del Rey’s songs, it feels like one of her most personal as she names her friends, quotes their conversations and even references other people she admires and looks up to, such as her friendship with Joan Baez as she sings “the diamonds, the rust and the rain”. The song paints a beautiful image of Del Rey’s community, which bolsters and supports her through heartache. But as the chorus returns to the image of the man who never returned and the vision of domestic life, paired with her admission that never getting that scares her, the song tenderly deals with her desire for love and her fear that it stands at odds with her artistic life and purpose.
“I really feel like there’s kind of a singer’s curse around meeting an honest partner who has no skin in the game, no dog in the race,” Del Rey said recently in a speech at Variety’s Hitmakers Brunch, adding, “And it’s super nerve-racking to have to hold onto an innocent perception of how things could go when you’re in an industry where maybe your values or your morals don’t quite match up with what’s going on.”
Having recently married and prepped to release a new album titled The Right Person Will Stay, it seems that perhaps Del Rey finally found a happy ending. But as the ultimate articulation of her fears and heartache during her search for love, ‘Blue Banisters’ feels like the most heartbreaking of all of her tracks.
